Mathias pa gov ra:
> Joe a écrit:
>
> I was struck by the passage in "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" about the
> Japanese "hon" particle being used to indicate success,
> -------------
> i never heard of that "hon" ibn that sense. what's that ?
> ------------
>
The context for this use was baseball. The book said that hon was used when
referring to a strike (a "successful" pitch) or a base hit (a successful hit)
though not with balls or pop-flies. at first I thought of something like
this, marking successful noun-events with special gender markers, but it
doesn't suit rodnús as well as marking verbs for result.
> and I decided that
> rodnús needed a convenient way to grammaticalize success, indeterminate
> result, and failure. The result has decreased the number of words my
> language needs, leaving me with some collapsed meanings to play around
with
> My solution is this:
>
> Tense and aspect previously behaved like so:
> Past: first consonant of verb becomes voiced.
> Perfective: first consonant of subject becomes voiced.
> Future: verb is suffixed with -n
> Incipient: subject is suffixed with -n
>
> I've collapsed the incipient and the future, so that suffixing -n on the
> subject is now the future tense marking. The verb suffix -n now indicates
> indeterminate result.
>
> Failure is indicated by the infix -ól-, and success is the unmarked form.
> Here are some examples:
>
> jey tob lobr~ wam fí
> she-PERF. give food VC2 you
> She's given you food
>
> jey tob-en lobr~ wam fí
> she-PERF. give-INDET. food VC2 you
> She's offered you food (but I don't know whether or not you've accepted
it).
>
>
> jey tólob lobr~ wam fí
> she-PERF. give-FAIL. food VC2 you
> She's offered you food (and you refused it).
>
> where
> VC2 Verb Class 2 (which deals with physical actions)
> PERF. Perfective
> FAIL. Failure
> INDET. Indeterminate result
>
> This system works very well, and it gives my language certain words and
> nuances it didn't have almost from thin air (such as the appearance of the
> word 'habmen'- "to lobby" from the root 'habmex'- "to persuade") One
major
> issue I have is the Verb Class Markers. pairs such as "to offer"/"to
give"
>
> seem to naturally utilize different verb classes ('offer' would normally
be
> a
> verbal action (ra) while 'give' would be a physical action (wam)). Anyone
> have any Ideas on this? what I'm concerned about is that by making both
> halves of the pair use the same class markes, different aspects of the
> action
> may become emphasized (e.g. using the "physical marker" with "offer" gives
> it
> a less social, civilized connotation (as Tarzan non-verbally thrusting a
> piece of meat in Jane's face or something) while using the "verbal marker"
> with "give" sounds sort of formal, like "bequeath" or "bestow"
>
> Any Ideas?
> ----------
> i find the way you classify verbs according to their "nature" very neat.
> "fuzzy" verbs like "give" have shades like tentative, perfective, accepted,
> etc. depending on the continuum of action they are part of.
> the problem is - like you illustrate it - that verbs of the "give" kind
have
> different acceptions depending on the partner's behaviour.
> whether "to give" is "successful" actually depends on the (incipient)
> partner's
> volition and ability. some partners are inanimate patients, others are
> beneficiaries and some even process the "gift".
> likewise "i talk to him" implies that he can process the information
> i address to him and "i feed her" means that she is able to consume her
meal.
>
rodnús handles these sentences like so, with different shades of meaning:
ka reg ra tam
I talk VC3 he (VC3 is the "spoken action class")
I talk to him (emphasis on my speaking)
ka reg es in tam
I talk VC8<---- he (VC8 is the "sensory input class")
I talk to him (emphasis on the fact that he listens to me when I speak to him
is supplied by the word "in", which links the word that follows it to the
verb class marker.)
A more interesting example is the sentence "I feed her" and the several ways
there are to translate it into rodnús:
ka song lobr~ wam xey
I put food VC2 she
I feed her (emphasis on me)
ka song in lobr~ nal xey
I put -->food->VC5 she (VC5 is the "change class")
I feed her (emphasis on the food being eaten)
ka song lobr~ nal-es in xey
I put food VC5-8<----she
I feed her (emphasis on her eating it. note that the "change" and "sensory
input" classes are used together here. this is because I am encountering
repeated trouble linking indirect objects to verb class markers; they simply
relate to verbs in different ways than direct objects and subjects in rodnús
and its something I need to work on. Your comments above have given me ideas
on making the verb class system a more open class (this has already begun
with the recent addition of the obscenitizer class marker, kín, which sullies
any sentence with some lasciviousness).
all interesting comments, all food for thought,
Joe Mondello